This may be a little much to follow but I'm going to try my best to keep it on point.
I have about 12 ASUS Rampage IV Extreme motherboards. One of the first boards I worked on I was able to successfully read with flashrom and then successfully write it to any other board I wanted too. I actually still use this ROM file to flash today.
The issue I have now is that I can not replicate this success. The process fails every single time, and when I say "process", essentially it's reading the BIOS and writing it to a file for later use. Before attempting to write the ROM to another board using flashrom, I always manually hexedit the file and change the MAC address. This has worked on a charm with the file that referenced earlier, the one that I use every time with success.
The problem after flashing is this - the board doesn't boot up immediately as it does with the "successful ROM", and it just hangs with error code 00 on the LED. Then I reboot it, and it has all of the correct settings in the BIOS. I go to boot the box in to the OS - and the LAN controller is dead. I see a message about
Now, for those unfamiliar with this board - it has 2 BIOS - you can flip from one to the other and repair them as well by logging in to x and cloning to y. Vice versa. Initially I thought maybe you could only flash a BIOS you read with flashrom from BIOS y to BIOS y, or BIOS x to BIOS x, or some other combination. That has proven false. The BIOS that works, to give as much detail as possible, was taken from BIOS y and has been repeatedly flashed to BIOS x on over 9 motherboards.
flashrom version used in successful ROM: r1564 flashrom version attempted to use with failure: r1673 pastebin from ROM that doesn't work: http://paste.flashrom.org/view.php?id=1640
I do not have a log from the success ROM - which stinks! I didn't realize this would never work again (or for the time being that I need to figure it out).
TLDR: flashrom read from ASUS RIVE has only worked once ever and can load on to any other ASUS RIVE I've come across. I can not replicate this success anymore - by using another machine to read the BIOS and then write it out to different motherboard. This causes the onboard NIC to die, and the post screen complains about not initializing the NIC because it is corrupted.
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wilson self